Let’s share | The Indian Express

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2018-08-13

Summary:

"Back in 2010, Aaron Swartz, a tech prodigy and political activist, sneaked into a basement closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and secretly connected his Acer laptop to the institute’s high-speed internet network. Using MIT’s credentials, he gained access to JSTOR, a digital academic database, and began to download thousands of files. Once a talented entrepreneur, he had renounced the traditional Silicon Valley career path for a non-conformist campaign of rigorous public-interest activism. But what was his intent behind downloading these articles? He aimed to make these journals openly available to online users as he believed in the fundamental principle of freedom of information. He also believed that those digitised academic documents behind the JSTOR paywall were for public use and that they needed to be liberated by guerrilla action, as he stipulated in his “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” in 2008....

A free and open culture would enrich our world in immeasurable ways. Let’s take a step closer to a world in which free access to knowledge is a basic human right and sharing is the norm, not the exception."